Recipe – Quick Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies

Normally, I make up some oatmeal, grits, or rice porridge for breakfasts for most of my week.  I’ll make up a big pot, and I’ll warm some up every morning.  During the winter, this is pretty much necessary.  Trying to eat cold cereal with cold rice/almond milk while it’s chilly outside stresses my tummy, which is something I try to avoid.  It may not make me actively sicky, but it doesn’t set a good precedent.

In the last month or so, however, it’s been warming up.  Either I’ve been too lazy to make up a pot full of mush, or it’s just not been appetizing.  I’ve been eating cereal lately.  Well, combined with the fact that I’ve run out of cereal, and it’s still not quite warm enough to be all right for me, I decided I needed to make up something different for breakfast this week.

I thought about muffins, cookies, bars, the lot.  Then I ran across someone’s recent post on oatmeal cookies.  Or oatmeal somethings, I don’t quite recall.

Eureka!

Sort of.

Most recipes will have tons of sugar.  Or something else I can’t have.  So I did a bit of googling and looked at a bunch of baked good recipes that included oatmeal and were mostly wheat-free.  Some were dairy free, some were sugar free (some day I’ll be consistent with hyphenating various -free things, but right now, I’m just not feeling it), some were vegan, some were egg-free… all in all, quite a mixed lot.  I took most of my inspiration from a site called Choosing Voluntary Simplicity, their recipe for Gluten-Free, Egg-Free, Sugar-Free Oatmeal Cookies.

Now, normally, I like to experiment in the kitchen.  I make my best creations when not working from any sort of recipe.  I realized that wheat-free baking actually allows me to experiment like I like to, assuming vague adherance to a few rules (try to get enough rise, use a mix of ingredients, and be creative).  I’d never been able to do that with regular (wheat) baking, because it always seemed so… finicky to me.  But wheat-free, I can mix as long as I want, I can play fast and loose with leaveners (baking powder, baking soda, etc.), and I can just see what works.

I think I may have struck gold again.  Or at least something shiny.

I collected all my various wheat-free baking ingredients that sounded promising.  I put them all on the counter.  And then I plotted.  And schemed.  And pondered.

Then I decided I’d just make it up as I went along.  Thus all measurements below are approximations, because really, I measured in handfuls, half-handfuls and fractions of a wee spoon.

I present to you, my oatmeal breakfast cookies.  ‘Cause I mean, come on, who doesn’t want cookies for breakfast?

Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies

• 2 ripe bananas
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp blackstrap molasses
• 4 T coconut oil (you could use butter (melted), or any other mild oil you have.  Almond oil, grapeseed oil, hazelnut oil… they’d all suit)
• 1/2 tsp xanthan gum
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp sea salt¹
• 1/2 C chopped, dried fruit (I used apples.  If you like raisins, that could be nice, as could dried cranberries, apricots, pears.  Anything with a relatively low-ish water content.  As in, don’t use fresh blueberries.  I didn’t chop my apples particularly well, so I zhipped them a bit longer than necessary.  Use your own judgement.)
• 1 T whole flax seeds
• 1 T ground flax seeds
• 1/2 C almond meal
• 1 – 1.5 T amaranth flour (I imaginemillet flour or quinoa flour could be good here…  It’s just to give it some body.  Use whatever flours you like, both here and the rice just below.)
• 1 – 1.5 T rice flour
• 1.5 – 2 C oats (I’m not sensitive enough to have to search out gluten-free oats.   I used …

Preheat your oven to 350 F.  I made this all in my Cuisinart.  If you don’t have one, use the appropriate subsitutions.  Puree your bananas until they’re seriously goopy.  If you’ve got the skills, add the remaining through the little hole at the top.  If not, just stop the food processor, add ingredient(s), cover, and zip.  After each addition, incorporate well.

Let the dough sit while you prepare your baking sheet.  I just used a cookie sheet schmeared with butter.  Grease with whatever suits your fancy, or don’t grease at all, and just use tin foil or silpat, or whatever you prefer.  I was trying the butter, hoping for a crisp bottom crust.  Currently, that still eludes me.  Sugar used to do it (I thought), so I haven’t figured out what to change yet.

Spoon out dollops on to your baking sheet with a small-ish teaspoon (as in, the kind you use to stir tea.  Use whatever smallish spoon you’ve got in your silverware drawer).  You’ll be plopping down about 2 tsp worth of dough on to the sheet.  Play with the amounts and the height, if you want.  These cookies don’t spread and don’t rise much (the amount of baking powder seems to just keep them stable and airy, so they’re not hockey pucks).  Smoosh them down if you want crispier, drier cookies.  Keep them as they are if you want moist cookies.  Have fun.

After you’ve dolloped as much as your sheet can handle, put them in the oven for 15 minutes.  If you flattened your cookies, they make take a little less time to cook. This recipe seems to be very forgiving. Just check on them.

At 15 minutes, they should be done. They won’t quite look done, but after they cool, they’ll be delightfully moist, yet still a little crunchy on the bottom.

Makes about three dozen cookies.  Which go really, really fast.

I am also pleased to announce they’re quite tasty with butter/margarine, if you’re so inclined (further pushing the ‘breakfast’ envelope).

¹ – I made three little cookies as a test batch, before I added the salt. I’m really not sure which version I like better. Sans salt, they seem a little sweeter, more cookie like. With salt, they seem a little more hearty, and suitable for breakfast. Take your pick.

ETA – The next morning, the cookies are a little less light, a little more substantial.  A few minutes in the toaster oven would do absolute wonders.  However, I have no toaster oven at work.  So, chew chew chew I must.

Recipe – Ginger Darklings

What better thing for my first post than my tasty adaptation of a triple ginger cookie recipe I saw recently.  You know, at least until I get a hang of this WordPress thing and figure out how to organize stuff.

I keep up with 101 Cookbooks fairly regularly.  Heidi’s recipes are often easily adaptable to something I can eat, and don’t often feature lots of things I can’t have in the first place.  But last week, she spotlighted her Triple Ginger Cookies and I knew I’d have to figure out how to make them.  The original recipe only called for 2/3 C of sugar and 1/4 C of molasses.  My acupuncturist has told me that molasses is good for me (or at least, not as bad), so I thought, hmmm, maybe I could nix most of the sugar entirely, and find a good flour blend to sub in.  And lo, I did.

Ginger Darklings (adapted from the Triple Ginger Cookie recipe at 101 Cookbooks)

• 2 C  gluten-free cookie flour blend (from Living Without, which is a fabulous resource.  It calls for superfine brown rice flour, but I used regular white rice flour from the Asian grocer, which is superfine anyway, and not scary expensive)
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 t Vietnamese cinnamon, ground
• 4.5 t  dry ginger, ground (I actually used tea-cut ginger, as it’s what I had.  Tea-cut being 1 mm pieces)
• 1/2 t fine grain sea salt
• 1/4 t xanthan gum
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter (I used salted, but I think you could use either.  Also, if you want to go non-dairy, like I should have, you could probably substitute coconut oil here, and melt it the same way.  Perhaps I’ll experiment later on with other oils (that are liquid at room temperature) and see what we come up with.)
• 1/4 C unsulphured molasses (I used blackstrap)
• 1 T sugar (or to taste)
• 1.5 T fresh ginger, peeled and grated (I used the fine grating side of my box grater.  I must acquire a microplane grater…)
• 1 large egg
• 2/3 C crystallized ginger, finely minced (I tried this in the Cuisinart, which was a joke.  Just make with a chopping board and a big cleaver.  For a long time.)
• 2 lemons, zest only (my lemons were sad, so I probably only got a little over 1 Tablespoon)

Preheat the oven to 350F degrees.  Prepare a baking sheet however you like – Silpat, parchment paper, tin foil.  I used tin foil and it worked fine.  There’s enough fat in this recipe that they didn’t stick at all.

In a large bowl whisk together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ground ginger, and salt.  Mix thoroughly – you don’t want a concentration of baking soda or xanthan gum in one spot.  Add the crystallized ginger and mix with your hands.  Break up any little clumps of ginger bits.  As well as making the ginger easier to work with, it also helps in the final stages of mixing so that you don’t have to work so hard to get everything mixed.   Add lemon zest to flour mixture as well, and mix with your hands.

Heat the butter in a skillet until it is just barely melted.  Remove from heat.  Stir in the molasses, sugar, and fresh ginger.  Stir stir stir ’til the butter and molasses homogenize.  Whisk in the egg (mixture should be warm, but not hot.  Be careful of this.  If it’s too hot, your egg will scramble.  And that’s not what you want).  Now pour this over the flour+crystallized ginger+lemon zest  mixture.  Stir until just combined.  The dough will be very dough-y, and not very liquidy.

(For a lemon-y-er taste, you could theoretically mix in the lemon zest into the warm butter and molasses mixture, to release (more) essential oils).

If you’re lucky enough to have a teaspoon scooper thing (like an ice cream scoop, but wee), it’ll be your best friend here.  If not, portion out bits with a small teaspoon (like for tea, not for measuring, unless you really care) or eyeball it with your fingers.  Roll into balls, and then press gently between you palms.  The cookies should be about an inch to an inch and a half in diameter and 1/4″ to 1/2″ tall in the center.  They won’t spread much in the oven, so you can leave only an inch between cookies, if you want.

Pop in the oven for 8-10 minutes.  You’ll know they’re done when they begin to crack and you can really smell them.  Cool however you see fit.

As this makes something like four dozen cookies, I cooked up about half.  Then I portioned out the rest like I would if I were to bake them, on the cookie sheet and everything (albeit a smaller one), and then put the whole thing in the freezer.  Freeze until solid.  Remove from freezer and put your uncooked cookies in a freezer-safe plastic bag, and then put back in the freezer (don’t let them thaw).  Now you can have a warm cookie or two any time – just take out a few and pop them in the toaster oven for 10-15 minutes at 350F (at least my toaster oven isn’t quite spot on as the oven for time and temperature).

According to my Diet Power software, one cookie contains far less than one gram of sugar.  So, for a gluten-free, candida-safe treat, these are perfect.  They’re not quite normal cookies, but when you can’t even begin to fantasize about having normal cookies, these are fantastic.

Next batch I bake up, I’ll even try to take pictures.  It didn’t even occur to me yesterday.